PDF Takes Center Stage

by Tatyana Sinioukov

Seybold Seminars program director Thad McIlroy, Arcadia House, highlights key issues of PDF workflows

Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF), the new golden child of the publishing industry, was a hot topic at Seybold in San Francisco in September. As PDF workflows are being implemented in various ways by industry pioneers, many agree that PDF stands a very good chance of becoming the standard for digital workflows in the near future.

PDF, says Thad McIlroy, president of the San Francisco-based Arcadia House and program director, Seybold Seminars, will have a profound impact on the efficiency and profitability of workflows.

A major advantage of PDF for the CTP workflow is that it allows for processing of pages independently of one another, he points out. Eventually, with the emergence of a new generation of RIPs that would accept PDF files directly, it would be possible, for example, to split up long documents and feed them to multiple RIPs.

According to McIlroy, Adobe originally created PDF as a non-print format--intended primarily for screen display.

"In its first conception--and it's still true today--PDF has the advantage that what you see in print can be preserved with absolute fidelity," he explains. "That kind of fidelity has tremendous appeal to a design-conscious world. Initially, there was a lot of excitement."

"With the emergence of the Web, it became clear that the optimal form for online viewing is not the same as the optimal form for print viewing." Some find, says McIlroy, that HTML is a more user-friendly format for onscreen viewing. To strengthen the PDF file format's utility online, Adobe added a number of different tools for online viewing, some of which are index-oriented, some of which are multimedia-oriented.

As the print industry adopted PDF, these features were carried over, too and they make PDF more flexible for multiple types of uses than any other format, says McIlroy.